Getting started with Inspectlet is as easy as dropping a few lines of code into your site, but we’ve got a few recommendations to get the most out of Inspectlet.

Handling Sensitive Data

Once you get Inspectlet up and running, you’ll immediately see everything your users see and type. Inspectlet will automatically hide any passwords entered by the user, but you can take it further and mark any field on your site as sensitive by adding inspectletIgnoreto the HTML class of that element.

By identifying users, you can associate a session recording with a meaningful nickname (name, email address, database ID, etc). Although optional, we highly recommend identifying users to have more context around your data throughout the dashboard.

Identifying users in Inspectlet is done with a single call to our javascript API:

Identifying a user takes your data to a whole new level by making the session recordings far more personal! When you’re viewing your recordings list, the Display Name column in Inspectlet will show you the user’s name:

Tags lets you send in any metadata you have about the user or session to be paired with the session recording. This ability lets you implement powerful custom behavior for your site:

Track Arbitrary Session Events – Did the visitor just encounter an error or do something unexpected? Tag the session with “ran into problem”, “used checkout tool”, “clicked buy button”, or an object with an updatable value, like {converted: true}.

Search for Sessions by User Traits – Send in any information you have about the visitor, common tags including age, gender, user_id, customer_id, date_created, pointsEarned

Integrate Inspectlet with Other Services – Tags can be used to store information from other services, like the name of the A/B test variation that the user is currently viewing. Common tags include abTestName, campaign_name, referrer_info.

To get started using tagging in Inspectlet, check out our tagging docs.

Target a Specific Audience With Targeting:

Once you’ve got data coming into Inspectlet, you’ll want to further refine your data collection to only sessions that are important to you. Targeting lets you set up conditions on which recording is triggered, for example if your team just launched a brand new design and you’re interested in seeing how users are responding to it, try targeting it!

To get started with Targeting, head to the Dashboard and click the “Targeting” icon from the Dashboard.

The example above illustrates how we’d set up our new landing page example. The targeting tool lets you use a wide variety of conditions to control when Inspectlet records visitors to your site.

Exclude Your Team from Inspectlet Tracking

Inspectlet makes it easy to exclude your team from being recorded, so your data doesn’t get affected by your team’s activity. To exclude team members from Inspectlet, head to the Dashboard and click “Settings”.

Inspectlet’s targeting feature allows you to track everyone or track a specific group of users. Targeting allows you to create a variety of conditions in order to distinguish users effectively. You can choose from many options such as:

Page URL

Page Title

Landing Page Title

Landing Page URL

Traffic Source

Browser Type

User Agent

Device Type

Visitor Type

Visitor Country

As you can see below, we selected to observe users who were using Google Chrome and were from the United States. These conditions were set under the Whitelist mode. This is just an example; Inspectlet allows for many conditions to be deployed. This simple yet powerful feature enables our clients to be very efficient, precise and effective in learning about their users.

We interviewed Nathan Lippi, a software consultant who used Inspectlet at Scribblar and other startups so that he could tell his story of how Inspectlet made tangible differences to the user experience at each one of the companies at which he worked.

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I’d usually go on a burst of watching videos for a day or two and I‘d spot enough things to give me enough to work on for a couple weeks … the results were immediate. There was a 250-300% increase in signups.

Mistakes happen. You’ve made mistakes; I’ve made mistakes; your boss has made mistakes; your friends have made mistakes; your parents have made mistakes (don’t take that last one literally). Mistakes are one thing that just about everyone has in common.

For marketers, one of the most frequent places mistakes are made is in their lead generation strategy. Lead generation requires provoking interest from consumers by triggering some sort of emotional response. Being that marketers are also human, it’s only natural that we fall back on our own emotions and biases to infer what those around us are like. And that right there is the biggest mistake a marketer can make.

To help identify where you may be letting your personal opinion hinder your lead generation performance, I’m going to cover three mistakes marketers make that are a detriment to their lead generation potential.

1.) Making Assumptions About Your Audience

Assumptions are a high risk, high reward decision, but one that I would not suggest making. Let’s say you are a Facebook advertising expert with an educational blog. For your first piece, you want to jump right in and cover Facebook Ad reporting. You realize you are skipping over a lesson on how to setup a Facebook Ad campaign in the first place, but you think your audience already knows that by now.

Best case scenario, you were right about your audience––most of them do in fact already know how to set up a Facebook ad campaign and are ready for your video on how to create reports based off their results You didn’t even have to take the time to create an introductory tutorial on how to set up a Facebook ad and your audience didn’t seem to mind. Nice!

But, worst case–– when you say “You guys are already familiar with how to set up a Facebook ad campaign” in your ad or video, you could be making a false assumption that leaves your audience thinking three things:

I must be stupid for not knowing this

This website is intended for more experienced marketers

I should leave

A lead should never be lost that way. You can always avoid making assumptions––whether that means additional research or content creation, it’s extra work that marketers sometimes try to skimp over.

Let’s real talk for a minute. If your business wants to stop making assumptions, keep this in mind:

Your audience may not like you

Your audience may not like the same things as you

Your audience might not really care about your brand

Your audience might not always understand you

Your audience might not understand industry jargon

Now, to clarify––assumptions are not always bad. Most great ideas start with an assumption. What’s going to make-or-break your lead generation strategy’s success though is your ability to test those assumptions.

Today, we have more advanced marketing analytics software available than ever before for testing assumptions. Inspectlet’s session recording feature is one new-age analytics software that is helpful for testing assumptions by showing you exactly what visitors are doing on your site by tracking their mouse’s movements, clicks, scrolls and keypresses. Its screen capture feature allows you to record individual visitor sessions and then play back that session later to see how visitors are navigating your site.

Let’s say you are given the task of increasing the average amount of time visitors spend on your site. Continuing from the previous example, you make the assumption that having more videos on your site catered towards Facebook ad beginners will improve the average amount of time spent on your site. The session recording feature shows you that a high number of visitors are pausing your “Facebook Ads Report” video after a few seconds and then scrolling up and down your page for a bit before exiting.

This could be a sign that visitors are looking for a more introductory video; therefore supporting (but not quite yet confirming) your assumption. Just like that, you’ve avoided confusing or scaring a visitor away, while identifying a potential solution for generating more educated and profitable leads that you can continue testing.

Another example of where this screen capture software is helpful is illustrated below. The user is on a mobile phone and gets to a page with a call-to-action on it, but is unable to scroll down. Most people’s first move after seeing this page was not converting well would be to split-test different CTA’s and copy, when all along it was just an easily fixable, technical error.

2.) Underestimating Landing Page Elements

While it’s important to stay on top of industry best practices, these should not be the only thing dictating the elements your business split tests. Basing which elements to test off of recommended best practices or your own personal opinion will lead to you underestimating the impact of [what you consider to be] minor elements of your landing page and ultimately limit your lead generation potential.

Let’s take a look at an example. The split-test below shows two variations of a landing page opt-in form. The only difference is that Version A includes a security badge and Version B does not. Can you guess which one yielded a higher conversion rate?

You would assume that having a security badge, which is intended to reassure customers of your business’s legitimacy, couldn’t possibly hurt your conversion rate, right? Wrong. Version B actually outperformed Version A by 12.6%. To reiterate what was said in the previous section, this is just one example of why you need to be testing your assumptions.

The problem with the security badge in Version A is that images like that are commonly associated with payments. Visitors filling out your opt-in form are at the very early stages of their customer journey and it is likely that this is the first time they are interacting with your brand. Putting the image there causes potential leads to subconsciously associate it with you asking for their money and are scared away. This might seem silly to the more technologically inclined, but––here’s that keyword again–– don’t assume your audience thinks the way you do.

Without running split-tests, it’s unlikely that anyone would have identified the security badge as the element hurting conversion rates. That is not a commonly tested landing page element and it’s impact would have otherwise remained underestimated. It’s for this reason that your business should be split-testing every element of your page, whether you think it will impact performance or not, and pay close attention to the results. I promise you will be surprised with your findings.

3.) Neglecting To Learn From Mistakes

Not every lead generation tactic your business tries out is going to work the way you had hoped. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you can learn from your mistakes and avoid doing the same thing in the future.

It’s for this reason that it has become common practice for businesses to run A/B tests. This is as opposed to just sweeping an entire page and starting from scratch again because something about that page wasn’t working. A/B tests allow marketers to incrementally test each element on their landing page to see which could be negatively impacting performance. Although these tests provide data that show what is and is not working, what they don’t tell you is the bigger picture on why that particular element is impacting performance the way it is.

As a basic example, let’s say you run an A/B test and find that your red call-to-action button is outperforming your green one. Aside from ensuring you change the standard CTA on that page to be red, it’s important that you examine what it is about a red button that is making it perform better. Some research on the psychology of color would reveal that red is commonly associated with urgency and triggers customers to act faster on an offer. By knowing this, you are able to then start implementing the color red into other facets of your landing page and further enhancing lead generation rates.

Just as important as understanding why red is positively impacting your page’s performance, is understanding why green is not. Rather than adapting a one-and-done mindset when testing different lead generation tactics, your business should be taking a more holistic and objective look at the successes and failures of your lead generation strategy to optimize the customer insights you are able to take away from each element.

WordPress is a fantastic blogging platform! It is easy to setup, has an extensive ecosystem, and is just generally a solid piece of software. We get questions all the time about best practices with setting up Inspectlet and WordPress, so we figured we would write a guide for you to use.

Step 1: Login into your WordPress Dashboard, Click on Plugins

Step 2: Search Plugins for “Inspectlet”

…It should turn up this plugin you see below .

Step 3: Download and activate on the Plugin(see below)! You will need an account with Inspectlet to get started. You can create a free account here

A/B testing on your site lets you quickly test different versions of your site to find which variation of your site sits best with your visitors. This guide will detail how to get started with A/B testing on your site.

A note on statistical significance

In order to get accurate and reliable results from A/B testing, you’ll need a certain number of visits and successful conversions per variation before a true winner can be declared. There’s plenty of literature out there on the topic, here’s a calculator to give you an idea. If your site is small, be prepared to wait for some time to get accurate results.

Typically when starting out it’s a good idea to run the Null Hypothesis Experiment. This is a quick and easy way to make sure that there are no unaccounted variables in your testing platform that could spoil your data. Create an experiment with only 1 variation: nothing. The purpose of this experiment is to have a variation that’s the exact same page as the control page to make sure that the result is 0% improvement. If the result of an experiment with no change is not 0%, there is something wrong with your testing platform!

Figure out what’s worth testing

Come up with some questions you want to answer with the help of solid data. For example:

Would a value-proposition based headline lead to more conversions compared to a concise explanation of my product?

Would including my prices up front help anchor my prospective clients’ expectations or scare them away before I have a chance to make my case?

Should I move this big paragraph about returning merchandise on the product page to the bottom, giving more attention to our free shipping policy?

Inspectlet’s user session recording tool can be handy here, allowing you to record and watch your real visitors. Watching a few people use your site can help you find areas causing confusion and allow you to witness unexpected behavior that you want to correct.

Give it a go!

It’s time to run our experiments! We like to use Optimizely at Inspectlet, but you can use any tool you fancy. When you’re creating the experiments, keep in mind that more variations per experiment means you’ll have to wait longer before reaching statistical significance. Set up some goals that align with your business metrics to track how well each variation performs.

Iterate based on results

After some time you should have empirical data on each question you wanted to answer. You can also use Inspectlet to watch user sessions of visitors experiencing different variations of your site.

Watching user sessions can not only help you understand why a specific variation performed the way it did in the numbers, but you’ll also witness any other changes to the user experience caused by the variation.

Rinse, repeat

Congratulations on running an experiment! Once you’ve found an improvement over the baseline, you can now push that change to all your visitors with confidence.

By identifying users, you can associate a session recording with a meaningful nickname (name, email address, database ID, etc). Although optional, we highly recommend identifying users to have more context around your data throughout the dashboard.

We’re thrilled to announce that Inspectlet now intelligently saves every version of your site’s assets. This improvement allows us to offer more accurate session replay than ever before, so that you’re able to see your website exactly the way it looked at the time the visitor saw it.

We’ve deployed this improvement to all users, you should be able to take advantage of it immediately.

We just added the ability to modify the URL that Inspectlet saves for a page.

For example, you may want to change the URL http://www.example.com/user/John to http://www.example.com/user/profile in Inspectlet’s perspective, so that you can easily identify and aggregate profile pages for heatmaps.